generalist + silly + curious + skeptic + scientist + tinkerer + friend + privacy maximalist + freedom advocate 🇺🇸
Texas, USA
Joined January 2018
- Tweets3.9K
- Following4.7K
- Followers531
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Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
Scaling Zcash to Visa-level throughput requires a next-generation networking stack. We're excited to share P2Pv2, which you can try out today in Zakura!
zakura.com/engineering/p2pv2…
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
Accepted finding #3.
Another High-severity issue somewhere in the @Zcash ecosystem is on the way to get patched.
Can't wait to unleash all the write-ups for all these crazy findings from our research over at @bluethroat_labs 🦅
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
JUST IN: The man who stopped the school shooting in Bend, Oregon, has been identified as 36-year-old Kalub Giamanco.
Giamanco, a carpenter, was reportedly driving home for lunch when he heard gunshots.
After hearing the gunshots, Giamanco, who has a concealed carry permit, followed the suspect into the school.
He then shot and killed 16-year-old John J Griffin moments after the teen opened fire into a special education classroom.
Giamanco, who has two children of his own who attend the school, is family friends with one of the victims, a 7-year-old who uses a wheelchair and was shot in the face.
The 7-year-old survived and is in the hospital.
Three children at Silver Rail Elementary School were killed. Their ages are 5, 8, and 11.
According to Giamanco's brother, Giamanco doesn't feel like a hero because he feels guilty for not being able to save more children.
You are a hero, Kalub.
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
Being an exceptionally talented musician is one thing. But to stand before such high-caliber fellow musicians, a large audience, and cameras—all while remaining composed, communicating skillfully and effectively, showing genuine enjoyment, and staying focused on the creative process—that is what truly amazes me.
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
Shielded funds. Shielded queries.
PIR is live in Vizor. Beta, for transparent addresses.
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
We condensed Tachyon’s design into a video that walks anyone familiar with Zcash’s protocol through each change.
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
Dear Prime Minister Ambani,
Please accept my humble apologies for not realizing that you are the real boss of India.
Naturally, you would prefer to maintain your monopolistic exploitation of the great people of India, but would you nonetheless consider allowing Starlink to compete?
There are many areas of India, as there are in all countries, with no Internet access, which denies children the opportunity for education and for small businesses the opportunity to sell their goods to a global market. Starlink would change their lives for the better.
Thank you 🙏
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
Since James Talarico hasn’t been seen publicly for 13 days in the final stretch of the campaign, here’s a reminder of just some of the things he believes:
-Opposes Voter ID.
-Supports Amnesty for illegal aliens.
-Believes there are six genders.
-Posted guides on how to evade ICE.
-Called the border a “welcome mat”.
-Supports the abolition of prisons.
-Says God is “non-binary”.
-Used the Bible to say that Mary would support abortion.
-Claimed Jesus was a “radical feminist”.
-Says atheists are “more Christ-like” than Christians.
-Supports men in women's sports.
-Thinks illegal aliens are “more Patriotic” than Americans.
-When asked what he thinks about besides family, he said “trans kids”.
-Voted against a bill to enhance criminal penalties for those who have committed at least four crimes in a ten-year period.
-Voted against a bill to mandate that the Attorney General must step in to prosecute human trafficking if local prosecutors fail to act.
There is nothing moderate about him.
Texans will reject this.
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
Hiding your coins in a bunker won't save your blockchain. Given the risks AI poses to fundamental cryptography, I propose every chain implement a "cryptographic recovery mode":
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
Here's our plan for quantum-safe, unlinkable, rotating taddrs. Possible with Zcash, today.
While others are worrying about the viability of rotating transparent addresses, we're already solving linkability.
zakura.com/engineering/trans…
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
I think Justin Drake's latest alarmism/vagueposting is going to do a ton of damage in multiple ways. It's basically a huge self-own for their own advocacy work on quantum stuff.
Threats from quantum/AI are real, and teams throughout this industry are making considered decisions about how to respond to those risks in a practical way, and to help their users navigate the uncertainty.
Some of those teams have really good cryptographers with an excellent grasp on the decisions they can make, others have to take their cues from trusted experts. There are so many dimensions to optimize along! And due to the complexity involved, it's almost impossible to explain this stuff to non-cryptographers.
Experts have to be cognizant of all this, and of their responsibility to be levelheaded.
After the fog clears up and people learn from their cryptographer friends what is actually going on, they're going to discover this was (at best) an unintentional marketing stunt and a lot of trust will be lost. And nobody will really know what to do...
This is a shame, because they are directionally correct. It actually meant something when they sounded the alarm before. They've just gradually descended into unhinged predictions without feedback to discourage it.
Can anyone, I mean seriously anyone, justify this debacle? It permanently colors all the legitimate concerns/predictions about classical crypto going forward. By their own admission, there was no new information that drove this. I think Justin Drake should explain how he thought this was the right approach, even if he genuinely believed what he was saying.
Baffling.
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
People read one emotional Matt Green tweet about public key encryption, spent 0 seconds thinking about it, and decide to panic.
Sure ECDLP will be broken with QC's one day. But there's so many levels to this being wrong to panic over.
- 0 actual progress on attacking anything
- We have tons of alternate plans available.
- Quadratic advantage hash-based PKE
- Lattices
- Multivariate polynomials
- A whole field of KEM's from fine grained cryptanalysis. (Fun fact, works even if P=NP)
Sure you can wake-up and choose doomer and be wrong.
We have decades of cryptography to draw from on for all the above options, AND how to build a lot of what we want from UX tweaks without PKE. PKE just made a lot much easier, and less web of trust routing like.
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
No. See all the discussion of Zcash Quantum Privacy leakage that applies today. Lets say you can break every ECDLP in the world for free.
If you do not know my shielded address, you cannot break any privacy.
If you do know my shielded address, and have a quantum computer or ECDLP break all you can do is learn the incoming payments to me. Not every other transaction you do.
Fun fact, as of Vizor updates coming in a few weeks, all your Near->Zcash receives will be fully quantum unlinkable by relying on the PIR techniques we already rely on for Tachyon.
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
This is not true.
What does public key cryptography come in for? It comes in for discovering you received a payment, when you send an address, and someone YOLO sends money to your address, and you only discover the payment from the chain.
In Tachyon we're already moving to new payment flows. The first of which is already usable in @vizorwallet today. It is "Payment Links" which encompasses:
- New user onboarding (Vizor gift cards)
- Any payment when you have a second chat form:
- This includes point of sale systems
- Paying anyone you have a group chat with.
Its merely UX shims to make each of these natural. This does not depend on any public key cryptography.
The second payment flow is repeat payments. Once you've paid someone once, all future txs between you two do not depend on public key cryptography.
The third payment flow is how you make public donation addresses. There we rely on permissionless "introducers" who learn nothing about you. If we lose public key cryptography, its fine, we can start figuring out more complex introduction schemes more web of trust like. There is decades of work thinking about this, well before modern app UX's.
Also losing public key cryptography is hardly risk consensus. Read Yehuda Lindell's replies immediately after. Your basing this off of literally zero demonstrable progress on the relevant assumption.
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
You took his one comment and extrapolated it, without any scrutiny or consideration, to several sequences of events with gargantuan assumptions. Ignored all other cryptographers with opposing views -- then further assumed the core team would do absolutely nothing, without seemingly knowing the underlying proposed alternative schemes, mitigation, or timelines they already have
You're welcome to make any investment or risk model you want, but id recommend at least basing it on something other than pure panic if youre gonna blast it out to everyone else
This is a highly hypothetical but yet entirely soluble scenario and I can guarantee no one will solve it faster than zcash if that time ever comes
Curious Coffee ☕️ 🛡 retweeted
Do the labs have better algorithms for breaking crypto?
Independent of the answer, the most important thing is to have crypto agility. Zcash has proven this, with 3 upgrades happening in 6 months, and Tachyon planned for January. The protocol design has plans for how to turn off features to enable safe protocol upgrades. This is what Quantum Recoverability is, and it applies equally well if there's a non-quantum ECDLP attack.
We're equipped on multiple fronts to protect against future bugs. In the next cryptography upgrade, coming January, already slated features are:
- PQ transparent
- Switching to Tachyon
What people don't realize about Tachyon is it switches us to R1CS, and enables far more crypto agility away from elliptic curves. The nullifier derivation no longer depend on elliptic curves. We get far greater SNARK agility and can very quickly move to STARKs when any crisis comes.
Today's Zcash transparent UTXO's give a better security guarantee than an ETH address. @ZakuraZcash has solved the privacy and performance problem that were blocking rotating T-Addresses natively in the wallet. This is done using PIR to fetch balances, and its already live in Vizor. So its a short UX leap to get this backup plan.
In January, the Transparent pool will be upgraded to support hash based sigs, that can later be STARK aggregated.
